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Cake day: September 5th, 2024

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  • that could be true, but my comment was the takeaway i had from reading the other comments in this thread (and from previous experience elsewhere on the internet). most people answering “arch” or “gentoo” are saying, themselves, that they like it because it “teaches them how linux works” or that they “like compiling stuff”. clearly the focus is tinkering with the system as an end in of itself, not using the system as a means to another end





  • from the comments, there’s a split between

    • linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
    • linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.

    i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it’s not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want









  • what i mean by production is “not randomly breaking because it’s feature freeze time and now i have to reinstall everything”. i assure you it’s not a high bar

    sorry if i sound a little annoying about this, it’s just that i’ve seen so many people recommending debian testing as if it’s just a different flavor of debian for people who want a more up-to-date system and are willing to deal with a little instability, but it is not that. debian testing is made exclusively for testing debian. it is not made for daily driving. i’ve had so many issues with debian systems in my lab which i later found out were caused by someone “upgrading” the system to testing bc they heard debian testing is the daily driving version and debian stable is just for servers that need 99.9% uptime

    honestly, you’d be better off using sid rather than testing, since it’s rolling release


    as for gimp, they can just use pinning to upgrade gimp exclusively. they can also use backports. no need to upgrade the whole system



  • it usually updates most packages when a new patch version is released (eg 2.3.1 -> 2.3.2). besides that, they will not update packages to new releases that add features

    there are some special cases where it might choose to update more often. debian uses firefox esr by default, but it will update to a newer esr version no matter what, for security reasons. the same must be true for thunderbird.